But it really would depends on courses, attendance, your attitude, qualities etc.

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Depends how much time you put in, it will sometime take 2 years to get through recruits and trade courses. Then to become a lance jack there may be some sort of course, when I did my full screws course there were people on there who had been in 3 years but they were fcuking useless to be honest. For a real young thruster with plenty of time for courses I'd say sgt in 6-7 years is certainly possible but all your mates will be stabs and you'll still be stacking shelves in jacksons because you've concentrated on your ta work

But it really would depends on courses, attendance, your attitude, qualities etc.

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Also I would say it was post recruit training, not 1-2 years from walking through the front door, but not far off. The pain with the TA is juggling time, so post recruit training =you are looking at Phase Trade training before some sort of leadership course, if for some reason you miss trade training (like you missed xx weekends, that you had to make up before CMSR and that was AFTER the latest trade training course has started) that could push eligibility on another year. If you're really unlucky the next trade training falls the same time as leadership and that's another year and so it rolls on. OR you get real lucky with courses and can spare the time you could get made up in very short time.

The other issue is slots, if your unit is heavy on rank and light on spare slots it becomes dead man shoes especially if you have a lot on the long time missing list that the PASO is pained to sign off.

Career management is a bit of an oxymoron in the TA, as its a par time career rather than your main bread winner and often troopies are too focus on next regimental this, next OC tasking that they forget the basics, for example we have shed load of lance jacks and only 3 full screws, 2 of which are REME LAD, but how many do you think are booked on the Full Screws course in Feb ??? Yep you guessed it feck all. Main reason for this is only running the det commanders course on camp which they need to be a full screw, but that's an extra 2 weeks they need to pluck out their arrse

depends if your regiment has gone through the fas 'restructuring'
this where the ******* in whitehall are having trouble pressing the enter button on a computer to work out all the t.a regimental capabilites and work put how many people it needs in each rank level
the rlc is taking ages. im waiting for my lance jack still. have been recommended for 2 years now!
everyone in my sqdn is waiting for this fas to finish then we get promoted at last

depends if your regiment has gone through the fas 'restructuring'
this where the ******* in whitehall are having trouble pressing the enter button on a computer to work out all the t.a regimental capabilites and work put how many people it needs in each rank level
the rlc is taking ages. im waiting for my lance jack still. have been recommended for 2 years now!
everyone in my sqdn is waiting for this fas to finish then we get promoted at last